Wednesday, January 23, 2008

I liked my flag best, and a thing or two about De-Baathification

I'm happy about the flag change and the new de-Baathification amendments, but reading the papers this morning still managed to get my blood to boil. And it got me thinking about the past and what events led up to these stories.

Back in the old days, when we in the Iraqi opposition were sorting out through what should get done in the first couple of weeks after the liberation of Baghdad, I came up with a design for a new Iraqi flag.

I was riding in a car somewhere in Washington DC, when I frantically began demanding a piece of paper and a pen; I had to commit the image in my head to the official record. For those of you with a knack for conspiracy theories, that little piece of paper came with American Enterprise Institute letterhead.

I didn’t want a flag with the color red in it; Iraq has had enough of a fascination with blood. And I wanted a flag that gave a nod to Iraq’s geography and some of its national colors.

So this is what it looked like:

The sky blue represents the snow of the Kurdish mountains to the north, hence that’s the color on top. The green band represents the fertile land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which are depicted by the two stars. The green band is diagonal because that’s what the course of the two rivers along Iraq’s map looks like. The beige represents Iraq’s deserts, which lie to the south and west for the most part and thus it’s the bottom color.

The two seven pointed stars add up to the 14 provinces that once constituted Iraq under the monarchy, which was a far better administrative system than the current 19. The number 7 and its multiples are also considered ‘blessed’ numbers in Iraqi folklore. The Kurds would be happy with the yellow and green colors (…the KDP banner is yellow, PUK is green). The Turkumans would love the sky-blue. The Shias would positively swoon over the green too, being the holy color of the Alid cause.

To my chagrin, the flag was expediently used for the Free Iraqi Forces, and then appropriated as a party flag by the Iraqi National Congress. The flag above could have been used as a national flag had anyone told me about the Governing Council meeting that temporarily decided on Rifaat Chadirchi’s flag; mine was never put forward for consideration. The Chadirchi flag was shot down by Sunni and Sadrist indignation over its supposed resemblance to the Israeli flag; it was a flimsy excuse to reject the flag (…I found it ugly, and a little too Ottoman-ish, given the Chadirchi’s Ottoman roots) but the Sunnis in particular didn’t want to part with a Baathist symbol.

There was a Baathist street campaign at the time that distributed stickers and flags all over Baghdad. One could immediately tell one’s political loyalties and even have a fair idea of one’s sect just by seeing a ‘Saddam flag’ on their car. The Baathists are not novices; they had security departments employing thousands of people whose job was to do grassroots PR for the regime such as starting rumors and watching cultural patters; this was top notch Stasi and KGB training. After the war, the Baathists had an old fellow pose as a madman on one of Baghdad’s busiest intersections wearing a leather jacket with pro-Saddam and pro-Baathist slogans scribbled on it as a reminder to passing motorists of their party’s menacing past and their ability to subvert the present. No, the Baathists were no novices.

And it’s funny how the western media is so ignorant about the history of the flag that had just been changed. The three stars do not refer to the tenets of Baathism, rather they represent a proposed union between Egypt, Syria and Iraq. It’s an Arab Nationalist flag that was adopted by Abdul-Salam Arif to replace Iraq’s first republican flag that had been introduced by Abdul-Karim Qasim, who had done away with the flag of the Iraqi monarchy.

The western media is also neglecting to mention that choosing a new flag and national anthem is mandated in Iraq’s new constitution, which was approved by a national referendum.

I am happy about the temporary change to the flag: it opens up the possibility of future, more dramatic changes. I don’t like the Allahu Akbar (‘God is Great’) slogan on it and what its colors represent, but parliament ruled that the change would be temporary and would last a year. And where are the Baathists today? Apart from getting a few fuming quotes out of Sunni parliamentarians published in today’s New York Times story about the flag change, I believe this time around the newest version of the flag will stick and in a year's time we may have a completely new flag.

DE-BAATHIFICATION

There’s just something so rotten about how journalists cover the Middle East region and how experts explain it; coverage and expertise are tainted by how regimes want the story told, and in Iraq’s case habits die hard: reporters and experts are adamant about seeing the story through the eyes of the ex-regime. There are no more government minders or Ministry of Information apparatchiks hovering about; there are no more threats of visa bans; local fixers no longer have to spy on correspondents; Iraqi academics no longer hide what they really think, and the absence of all these dark reminders of the past has confused the hell out of reporters like the Washington Post’s Amit Paley and Joshua Partlow as they wrote-up the de-Baathification story today from the vantage point of ex-regime types.

And it took a Sadrist—a bloody Sadrist—to be the lone voice of moral clarity:

“Why is the United States not asking about the victims of the Baath Party?” said Shansal, a member of the Shiite party led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. “I don’t understand why you are so interested in the executioners and forget about the victims of Saddam and his bloody regime.”

But Shansal gets as much print space as an anonymous Western diplomat who disparages the work of the De-Baathification Commission and denounces it as anti-Sunni. Of course, anything associated with Chalabi must be false and sinister, according to DC journos.

That’s so idiotic. The de-Baathification story gets plenty of airtime but no reporters or ‘Iraq experts’ have taken the time to really understand it. The dominant theme is that it was a heavy club wielded against Sunnis. There were five co-equal executive posts in the Commission, and the most critical one was the Information Department. Chalabi’s pick for that was Abdul-Aziz al-Wandawi, a Sunni. Chalabi’s other pick for the Education and Culture Department was another Sunni, Mithal Alusi. Wandawi was a Communist in his youth, and Alusi a Baathist. Those two departments were as diverse as possible, with many Christians and Mandeans on the payroll. The other three departments were controlled by SCIRI, the Da’awa Party and the Sadrists, the latter represented by Ali Faisal al-Lami. Nouri al-Maliki, now Iraq’s Prime Minister, was one of Chalabi’s deputies on the Commission’s board. Another board member, Younadim Kenna, head of a Christian Assyrian party, designed the Commission’s administrative structure.

And reporters and experts pretend that the only text that governed the Commission’s actions was Bremer’s edict. Not so: there is a detained law passed by the Governing Council that created the Commission and mandated its actions.

De-Sunnification? Well, the Saddam regime and the ones before it built the state’s structure on the premise that Sunnis are more trustworthy, giving them a disproportionate share of the executive. Should all of that have been kept in place?

The first province to send in appeals for re-instatement of fourth-tier Baathists, the ones who collected and collated the surveillance reports in schools, factories and neighborhoods from lower ranking Baathists, was Sunni Mosul. Thousands of dossiers arrived and I personally approved 90 percent of them on the spot without even looking at them simply by checking out their professions: teachers. Re-instatement for such jobs where being a Baathist was not as damaging to others than say, a professional torturer in the mukhaberat, was almost automatic in the early days when the Commission wasn’t fully staffed and overwhelmed by appeals.

These are just some examples of what is being overlooked when considering this story.

However, the Americans, in their frenetic drive to appease the Sunnis who’ve been fighting the new Iraq, had proposed a law where even members of Saddam’s Fedayeen get pensions. Wait, why don’t I get a pension for the years I spent working against Saddam?

What about the man whose brothers disappeared or his wife was raped because he stood up to Saddam? Does he get a pension, does he get compensation? Does he even get to watch the thugs who ruined his life get punished?

No. Because some cowardly idiots at the US Embassy in Baghdad have decreed that even Chemical Ali and his colleagues should be given a free pass in contravention of Iraqi law, if it means keeping the Sunnis happy.

But something even stupider has occurred: the Americans allowed the Baathists to hijack Sunni representation by making the unraveling of de-Baathification a key marker on the path of sectarian reconciliation. Suddenly Sunnis, many of whom with little stake in the Baath’s legacy, were manipulated to see the Baathist cause as their own. Where are the Baathists in the insurgency? What real strength do they bring to it? But their demands are met first because they know how to mold perceptions. I said it before and I’ll say it again, the Baathists are not novices.

The damage is done: Sunnis ended-up identifying with the ex-regime far more in the post-liberation era than during the three decades of its rule. That's a fact now, but it is just one of many facts about Iraq, like how many non-Sunni Arabs live in Iraq?

Just how many Sunnis are being kept happy? And how many others are going to get mad as hell? According to Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an organization that would theoretically be sympathetic, the Sunnis only constitute 12-15 percent of the Iraqi population. I’ve seen a very smart confidential study that puts their number at 13 percent and I’ve heard credible people put their numbers at 9 percent.

Here’s a political reality: I and many others will always vote for a party that promises to punish more, not fewer, Baathists. For every Baathist to be de-Baathified there will be four angry, vengeful victims who will never forget. That’s one of the most basic political ratios in Iraq, and the future political map will be shaped by it.

I’m glad that the dozen or so versions of parliamentary committee rewrites of the original law that some feckless State Department idiot had first circulated has ended-up being worse for Baathists. I’ve seen the ex-regimes archives. I have spent much time delving into them. I literally waded through the paperwork of pain. I know what they’ve done. I am haunted by the prison pictures of their victims. This was a totalitarian nightmare. I can understand why Jews are still hunting down Nazis sixty years after the Holocaust. It would be a perfect pleasure for me to spend the next few decades finding out who wrote which report that led to what arrest, and who wielded the electric cables, and who pulled the trigger.

And if I can’t put them behind bars, at least I want to put them to shame. I want them to bow their heads when their grandkids ask them about the Saddam years.

Some diplomats, journos and experts want to muddle the moral clarity of that moment and equate the victims with the poor sadist who lost his pension. “Boo-hoo-hoo, I spent my life killing and maiming for Saddam and all I got was this lousy, blood-stained T-shirt”, cries the disposed Baathist in Amman, and a tear rolls down a WaPo reporter’s cheek.

This won’t sound very academic or professional, but what I really want to say to all such diplomats, journos and experts is:

Really? We only have 18 provinces? Didn't Saddam create a 20th province so that history will always remember Kuwait as the 19th province?

I'm so confused ;)

That being said, I don't believe that our territorial dispute with Kuwait is resolved, and we should not be in a hurry to resolve it. After all, Kuwait hasn't dropped the debts or the reparations, and Kuwaiti businesses are very arrogant when dealing with their Iraqi investments. Iraq will continue to grow stronger, and one of these days we can renegotiate many of these outstanding issues.

But the number 19 was an honest-to-Allah typo...I can hear all of you going, "Yeah, right."

Great post Nibras! I wholeheartedly agree with everything you stated. The Iraqi Shia/Kurdish mainstream political entities need to pool their resources together to establish a strong lobbying outfit in Washington for the purpose of reversing the current US support for this counterproductive problem.

Fantastic, Nibras. It was mind boggling how the western media airbrushed the crimes of the Baathists out of memory and romantised the insurgency in the early days - am thinking particularly of the reporting of my fellow countryman Michael Ware, now at CNN.

I don't even know where to start with Perry's two published columns and all the distortions in them. Someone is trying to push a certain story, and they are doing it through Perry.

One needs to realize that there's an attempt to turn the whole "we need to talk to the bad guys" approach into a lucrative business model by the likes of Alastair Crooke, so is it a mystery that his deputy is called Mark Perry?

http://conflictsforum.org/who-we-are/mark-perry/

Maybe these anonymous officers that Perry quotes have been promised post-military jobs in Crooke's outfit, who knows?

But to be honest, I think it is all just hot air that shouldn't be taken seriously...just another bunch of has-beens trying to make a quick buck off of Iraq's confusion. Sure, some dorks in DC will be awed by this stuff, but it changes nothing on the ground in Iraq; real power, and access to the purse strings, lies elsewhere. It certainly ain't with the Gaouds or Janabis of the world anymore...

"Some diplomats, journos and experts want to muddle the moral clarity of that moment and equate the victims with the poor sadist who lost his pension. “Boo-hoo-hoo, I spent my life killing and maiming for Saddam and all I got was this lousy, blood-stained T-shirt”, cries the disposed Baathist in Amman, and a tear rolls down a WaPo reporter’s cheek."

"your flag"Personally i like the old flag much better!!I agree that the old colors(red and black" were a bit distressing;however,your new one makes every1 happy kurds,shiites,turkumans,...but u never once mentioned sunni's? whats ur point??????